Content area
Full Text
The European Parliamentary elections of 2014 were record-breaking in two dimensions. They saw the lowest voter turnout in the history of EP elections (since 1979) and the highest support for the "Eurosceptics camp." The turnout was 42.45%,1 and the Eurosceptics gained 100 MEPs,2 from both the right and the left wings of the political spectrum. The relative success of these parties seems even more significant if we take into account that they won elections (or achieved second best results) at national level in major EU Member States. Among them were UKIP in the United Kingdom, the Front National in France, the People's Party in Denmark, Syriza in Greece, the Five Star Movement in Italy and Sinn Féin in Ireland. The success of the Eurosceptics came at the cost of mainstream parties in the EP. The European People's Party (EPP) lost (in comparison to 2009) 53 seats, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S and D) lost five seats, and the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) lost 16 seats. At the same time, soft Eurosceptics (or the Euro-assertive group) from the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) gained 13 seats and has become the third strongest political group in the EP.
In spite of the loss of influence of the three main political parties in the EP (the EPP, the S and D, and ALDE), the pro-European parties, sometimes called federalists, managed to keep a decisive majority and to elect their candidates for the president of the European Commission and the European Parliament. The relative success of anti-establishment parties can be explained mostly through the low voter turnout. In elections with low turnout, populist parties, in this case mostly Eurosceptic parties, trying to gather the support of dissatisfied segments of the society, tend to be over-represented. Because the EP elections are often treated as second-order elections, voters treat them as less important than national ones, which encourages votes for protest parties that seem too extreme for voters in first-order elections.3
The results in Poland were exceptional, as in the rest of the EU. First of all, the major opposition party Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc, PiS) gained 31.78% of the vote, virtually managing to tie with the ruling party Civic Platform (Platforma...